Adventurous jazz pianists are all too often compared to the great Cecil Taylor. Years after his death, the master remains a mile-marker, his name almost an adjective for the indescribable.

But sometimes it fits. Taylor's music brought Yuko Fujiyama to the outskirts of free improvisation, so much so that years ago she could be seen at his concerts, silent and in rapture, a small white dog named Yuki on her lap, all four eyes focused on the shaman on the stage. "Maybe for her it was a lullaby," Fujiyama said with a laugh, remembering her long-since-passed canine companion. "She was very quiet except once, I went to see Shelley Hirsch and she jumped up on the seat." Fujiyama, speaking by video call from Japan, imitated a howl.

After discovering Taylor's music in 1980-she heard drummer Jerome Cooper playing a recording in his East Village apartment on her first trip to New York City and, seeing her transfixed on the street, invited her up to listen the piano maverick became a model and inspiration for Fujiyama's approach to free jazz. But her piano hadn't been heard, at least not in public, for more than 15 years when Innova Recordings released her Night Wave in 2018 and then it was a very different approach to playing and to leading a group. But Taylor was still a factor and in a roundabout way was key to Fujiyama's long hiatus. After putting a pause on public performance in the early 2000s, Fujiyama retreated to her apartment in the Bronx, where she has lived since making New York her permanent home in 1987, and retreated to her own piano, working on developing new ideas.

"I was so happy doing that free improvisation, I love that, but from 2000, I wanted to do my own compositions," she said. "I was trying to compose, but I didn't think it would take so long. Finally, I thought it was OK to start to perform. I thought, 'my composing isn't so good, but maybe it is OK.'"

During her hiatus, she also made visits to Japan, to see her parents in Sapporo and, as it happens, replace old inspirations with even older ones.

"I'm very impressed by Cecil Taylor," she said. "Cecil changed my life. My music was very influenced by his music but around 2000 I started to think, 'this expression is not the experience of my whole.' I started to look for my language. I thought, I'll start again.

"Cecil is so high energy, it is so amazing," she continued. "I think that's an energy everybody has inside. He pulled that out from me. That root is American jazz. That's not me. What I found is more space. I started to work in Japan with Butoh dancers. The way they move their bodies, feel the energy from the space, I feel that is somewhere I want to go. I feel it is Asian expression."

Those influences came to the surface on Night Wave (which was dedicated to Cooper) and are present again on Quiet Passion, released by Intakt last spring. Night Wave featured a couple of players who may well have related to Fujiyama's new Asian approach-violinist Jennifer Choi and percussionist Susie Ibarra along with Graham Haynes on cornet and flugelhorn. While he may have been an ethnic and gender outlier in the lineup, he fit into Fujiyama's concept. "We can share the space," Fujiyama said of Haynes. "His roots are groove but he has a common space with me. He has a lot of silence in his music. I assume his groove is happening but it's similar to a Butoh dancer's breathing."

Haynes returns for Quiet Passion, along with the Japanese-born electronicist Ikue Mori, with whom Fujiyama has occasionally played since the '90s. She is quick to point out, though, that the expression she sees as Asian isn't uniquely Asian, citing other jazz pioneers with an understanding of open space in their music -Marilyn Crispell, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith - as well as her own bandmates on the two records she has made since coming out of professional seclusion.

"It is all human expression, breathing, feeling the space, listening to silence," she said. "It is not all about race, but Eastern expression. I was always frustrated in New York City that it is not well known."

Quiet Passion builds downward from Night Wave, with more space in the music and an ethereal atmosphere created by Mori's processed drum machines and Haynes' electronic effects. It is a beautifully serene record, sometimes active but never anxious, anchored by Fujiyama's readings of the contemporary poet Shuntaro Tanikawa (translated by Fujiyama into English).

That wonderful realization of her new approach isn't the only way Fujiyama is, at 68, redefining her career. This fall, she registered a nonprofit, Contemporary East, which will make its programming debut this month at Roulette, setting into motion another new aspect of her career, that of event producer. The first of the new organization's efforts will consist of performances by musicians who are either Asian or at least, to borrow her phrase, "feeling the space." Appearing over the two nights will be artists familiar to New York stages...

These three are New Yorkers with roots in jazz and experimental music. Graham Haynes, the son of drummer Roy, has placed his cornet and electronics in a dizzying range of music, including early straightahead dates. Japan-born pianist Yuko Fujiyama, the ostensible leader of this recording, had her life turned around by hearing Cecil Taylor in 1980 and his music remains a strong influence. Mori (electronics, just announced as a 2022 MacArthur Fellow) may be most known for working with Arto Lindsay in the downtown no-wave band DNA. Together, they are in a word, free.

The pieces are mostly short, with Fujiyama's interjections in Japanese and English. On “Kurikaesu”, the longest composition, cornet and piano engage in spare interplay, with a gently bubbling electronic bed and words from Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa. "Dialogue" also features their contrasting playing. The short "Whispering Universe" finds Fujiyama going inside her instrument to play the strings while Mori provides atmospheric electronics and Haynes gets moody. "Agitato" is all piano and electronics and nearly violent for a whole minute and a half; here the aforementioned Taylor looms large. Fujiyama has two piano solos on the disc and they reveal her own darting and idiosyncratic style. It is a good way to hear this uncompromising musician, who hasn't recorded all that much (and took a long sabbatical between 2000 and 2017).

The first half of "Improvisational Suite" has Haynes playing through echo effects under busy piano and electronics. Miles Davis isn't in the building, but he is down the road a piece. The second half is far more sparse. The three parts of the title track live up to their name, full of space and meditative, a touch sad, with the musicians in various combinations. The long third segment has all three working together to round out the disc...quietly.